"Linux Gazette...making Linux just a little more fun!"

Linux and Windows 95
The Best Bang for Your Buck

Many Linux users tend to think of
Windows95 as a competitor to Linux. In
mailing lists and in Usenet it is common
to encounter comments that portray
Windows95 as the materialization of
evil and Linux as the savior of all
cybernetic souls. While it is my belief
that only a small portion of the Linux
community believes the source of all
darkness is Redmond, it is easy to get
caught by passion and forget to
analyze this situation through a more
technical light, which would definitely be
more productive in promoting the
growth of Linux, through it's own merits.

Of course Microsoft has thrown more
than it's share of low blows over the
years. But it is hard for me to believe
that any other company in the position
Microsoft was in would act much
differently. And in any case, the Linux
community has nothing to gain by
confronting the Goliaths of the software
business in any field except the
technical one. The media attention we
have received lately is totally funded on
the quality of Linux, which by the way
separates us clearly from the pack.
This attention will only grow in the
future, especially if we present
ourselves as mature albeit idealistic
developers, which most of us are.

We know all too well that Windows95
and it's applications are not as stable
as we would like, that support is very
poor and expensive, how inflexible and
insecure it is, and all the other perils
that plague it. People in charge of
supporting it are familiar with error
messages like: "Consult an Expert" and
"Reinstall Windows95".

But if you can put up with that, what
you have is an extraordinary operating
system: It is very easy to use, install
and configure; It is inexpensive; It has
impressive internationalization support;
it has excellent development tools; it is
supported by nearly every major
hardware manufacturer; not to mention
the tremendous amount of high quality
software available in almost every
category for the platform.

Linux, on the other hand, has a
different set of advantages. It is rock
solid, has excellent support, is
extremely flexible and secure, is free, is
open, and so on. From a technical point
of view, it is incomparably superior to
Windows95.

The problem is that companies have
invested billions of dollars in software
and training for the Windows platform.
And Linux does not run Powerpoint, or
MS Word, or Delphi. Also, most end
users will not take advantage of the
extra flexibility and security offered by
Linux. It is not that they have no use for
it, it is just that they are so used to
working with what they have, and so
wary of changes, that they don't really
care about the advantages they may
get. It is sad, but true: They would
rather not save sensitive information
than learn about permissions; They are
so used to rebooting their machine all
the time that it has become as frivolous
as clicking a mouse button.

Most end-users spend the whole day
performing parametric transactions on
their machines. In many cases, even
management will prefer to wait days or
weeks for their IS department to
prepare a GUI interface to a query than
to learn SQL and get the information
immediately. Of course I and many
people use Linux for most of my
personal computing needs. When I use
Windows95, I really miss the things we
take for granted in Linux, like powerful
command line tools, permissions,
stability, etc... But unfortunately most
users are not like that nor are they
likely to be.

Linux is best exactly where Windows is
lacking. It is strong in support for
different software platforms. It is
designed to be sturdy and take heavy
workloads day in day out. It has
marvelous internet tools, and picks up
the security buck where Windows
passes it. Nobody wants a web server
or for that matter any server in which
you can't have 100% confidence on.

For all these reasons, looking at Linux
as an alternative to Windows95 is in my
opinion a mistake. It's greatest potential
will be achieved as a server and
manager for Windows, complementing
Windows' weaknesses and
guaranteeing a high level of service to
the enterprises who select it. If at all
possible, it's generally a good idea that
end users don't even know -- or need
to know -- that it's Linux that is offering
the advanced services they're using.

That having been said, the natural
competitors to Linux become Windows
NT and other unices. So let's see why it
is by far the natural choice for this role.

In every step of the initial cost equation
you will be saving money with Linux. To
begin with it is free, or almost free if
you want to take into account the cost
of a distribution. Then It requires far
less computer resources than it's
competitors, and you'll also save money
there. Also it will often eliminate or
reduce the need for additional
equipment, especially when compared
to NT. Then it is portable to several
platforms. So instead of supporting NT,
Solaris, Ultrix and AIX, each with it's
own expenses in training,
documentation, etc..., now you only
have to support Linux. That aspect
alone can save thousands of dollars
every month to an organization.

With regard to software, not only you
will find almost every type of software
you may need for free or very
inexpensively, but bugs are corrected
and new features are added with
incredible agility. No more of that "it will
be fixed in the next release" talk. And
since almost everything comes with
source code, if your organization needs
a feature with great urgency, it is much
easier to add it than with a closed box
OS. That is not to mention the speed
with which Linux itself is updated.
Security holes and bugs are quickly
tracked and fixed, frequently in a matter
of hours. Nobody can put a price tag on
that.

Probably the biggest difference
between Linux and it's competitors is in
support and documentation. No, it is
not commonplace yet to have your
Linux vendor put you on hold for half
an hour to charge you big bucks for
online support like the other guys. And
yes, there are situations in which online
support is indispensable. But there are
already options for online support for
Linux, a business which has everything
to grow considerably as Linux invades
the corporate market. And in an
emergency, putting a Linux server up
and running can be done much faster
than any of it's competitors. In fact, in
many cases you can have a spare hard
disk laying around for an eventuality. If
you need it, pop open just about any
PC, stick the disk in there, turn the
machine on and go. Also, if you want to
really do things right, the low setup and
maintenance cost makes redundant
solutions using Linux much more
interesting than with any other OS. And
that is not to mention that a lot of
people, including probably the people
who will be in charge of maintaining
Linux at work, use or will use Linux at
home. How many people you know use
Ultrix or even NT at home?

If your business is connected to the
internet, you will get an infinite
knowledge base, always willing to help,
generally for free. Antagonists will say:
"Other OSs have their own mailing lists
and Usenet groups too." But the fact is
that no other internet support group is
even closely as effective as Linux's.
Linux is unique in that it offers many
more tools to fix your problems. It
doesn't matter how big a guru you may
be, if the software you use is not
traceable by a debugger and doesn't
come with source, you will not be able
to get answers as fast and as easily.
And there is a "positive spiral", as Bill
Gates would like to define it, with Linux
support: A lot of people learned a lot of
what they know through the Linux
internet support channels. Now they
feel in many ways obliged to help lots
of other people. Who will learn a lot of
what they will now through these
channels. And so on.

Linux documentation is incomparable to
any other OS's. Not only in quantity,
quality and price, but also in that it is so
frequently updated. From novice users
to accomplished network
administrators, it is more than likely that
you will find most of the answers you
need from the documentation that
comes with your distribution or with the
CDs that accompany it. If you don't find
it there, it is almost always somewhere
in the internet, reachable by any search
engine. More and more books are
published every month about Linux.
There are monthly publications like
Linux Journal and Linux Gazette
available. There are tutorials, howtos,
faqs and other documents describing
every single detail of the operating
system, and most of the software that
comes with it. And that is not to
mention the inheritance of over 20
years of UNIX expertise and
information. In total, the amount saved
with support and documentation
expenses every day with Linux can add
up considerably.

Administrative costs are also much
lower in Linux, and administration is
much easier on Linux than in any other
OS. An argument many people use in
favor of NT is that it is so easy to
administrate. A lot of UNIX people were
at first fearful of losing their jobs when
NT came out. Now, how many NT sites
you know don't have a dedicated
administrator? The fallacy of Microsoft's
argumentation is that administrative
costs are not affected by creating new
users in a GUI instead of using a shell
script, or even editing a file. They are
not affected by day to day operations
when things go right, and they are not
affected by performing ordinary
maintenance. What really skyrockets
your administrative costs is when things
go wrong. And anyone supporting
networks knows that they do. With any
system. And when that happens, you
need clear error messages. You need
trace and debug capabilities. And you
need documentation. And Linux offers
all these items in great generosity,
much more than NT and more than
most other unices.

Another factor that increases your
administration costs is when you have
to do anything that is out of the
ordinary. When that happens, you want
flexibility. And while NT may be
acceptable for cooking pasta, finer
dishes will require tools and flexibility
you can only get from UNIX. Because
Linux is so flexible, you can frequently
eliminate routers, bridges, and other
equipment which not only add to
additional hardware cost, but also
contribute to make your network more
complex, introduce new environments
to be learned, and become yet another
failure point. With Linux, cost involved
in the maintenance of these
equipments can often be eliminated,
and other times, greatly reduced.

Getting To the Point -- Integrating Linux and Windows95

Using Linux with Windows95 is not a
very complicated task. Most of the work
is handled by the Samba suite, a host
of programs designed to work with the
SMB protocol, capable of most services
you expect from a network server:
Handling logins, sharing hard drives,
printers, etc... Samba is especially
useful when you have a mixed
UNIX/Windows95 environment, like we
did at the Mathematics Department at
UFC. When people logged on any
Windows machine, they would have
access to their home directories at the
H: drive. This brought up an
administrative problem, as people
quickly took up all the hard drive space
available installing Windows programs
in their H: drives. Nothing that a quota
system won't fix.

Samba fools your Windows95 machine
into thinking that it is talking to a NT
server. You can have network profiles,
unified registries for all your machines,
run login scripts, and generally have
most of the bells and whistles available
with NT. [See earlier issue of Linux
Journal]. It is one of the best supported
and documented programs available.
The only problem I had is that logins
take a little longer to complete, when
compared to NT. It is generally a little
slower than NT, but perfectly usable.
The configuration files have a format
similar to the Windows .ini files. You
can use it to share printers, hard disks,
cdroms, etc... According to the
documentation, there is no real reason
why other mass storage peripherals
shouldn't work, although I haven't tried
any.

At PCC Inform=E1tica, a computer retailer
at which I installed an intranet based on
a sole Linux server, I also installed
HylaFax, an excellent fax server. It was
not as simple to install, mainly because
it asks so many questions that it can
scare you. If you take your time to
answer them, especially with the aid of
your Modem's manual, it should be no
big deal. Also it searches for some
programs which you will not find in
most distributions. For instance, it
asked me for mawk, which I
symbolically linked to gawk, and never
had any problems. The Windows95
Hylafax client, whfc, works reasonably
well, although it is not quite stable
enough for everyday use, and lacks
important features, like job scheduling. I
contacted the author, but he was busy
with other projects, and told me that he
could not release the source code
because of limitations by his employer.
HylaFax is so richly documented I
decided to implement my own client,
with the specific needs of my
organization. As soon as I get a couple
of machines, I will start doing that. Any
volunteers?

Mail came mostly configured. Not only
sendmail was configured correctly
almost right out of the box, but a pop
server also already came installed. All I
had to do in Windows95 was install a
major browser.

Information about products is created
on regular Windows95 programs, then
converted to HTML and made available
for the intranet at the Linux server.
Tutorials and documentation for
installed programs available in HTML
are also available from the server.

The Linux machine at PCC Inform=E1tica
also has the responsibility of doing IP
Masquerading for the whole network of
22 machines and counting. I had to get
the newest stable kernel at the time
(2.0.29), and a patch for it to work with
ftp.. Even in this kernel, the help
message on the configure script will say
that masquerading is experimental
code. I never had any problems,
running the machine under the
conditions above. Once the kernel was
recompiled, all I had to do was add two
calls to ipfwadm and I was all set. I had
invaluable help from the people in the
internet for this task. The Brazilian linux
mailing list linux-br, an Issue of Linux
Journal, the kernel documentation, web
documentation, were all useful tools for
me to get this job done.

Telecommunications in Brazil is very
expensive. At the time we were
planning this network, our first thought
was on getting a 64k leased line from
the company to our service provider.
That would cost us around US$1050 a
month, only on telephone company
charges. So we decided to build a new
machine, install it at our service
provider and put in it our web content,
ftp server and mail server. The
company would then access the
internet via a dial-up account, which
would cost us only US$210 a month.
Since dial-up calls tend to fail a lot, I
made a simple script which would
check if the line was ok, calling the
service provider again in case the line
had dropped. Also this script mailed my
outside account the current IP number
for the machine, in case I needed to
access it from somewhere else in the
internet. Then I put the script to run
every 5 minutes with crontab. Simple
and agile. In other words, low
administration costs. If the bandwidth
required increased sufficiently, it would
be easy to add a second modem and
use equal line balancing to get a higher
throughput.

Another use for crontab is making
automatic backups of the companies
database, which runs on Access.
Everyday at noon and at 6PM a copy of
the whole database is made to the
server using a script based on smbtar,
part of the Samba suite, and at 8PM a
copy of the database is made to tape.
The home directories, which users use
at their Windows95 clients mainly to
store business proposals, are also
saved to tape every week. Most users
don't even know there is a Linux
machine in the network.

Bottom Line -- Savings

Savings with Linux start with the O.S.
itself, grow through setup with lower
power equipment (All the above work
smoothly on a Pentium 133), and by
making networking hardware
dispensable (router), goes through easy
software setup, flexible settings and
easy administration and training, and
adds up every month, with low
equipment maintenance costs, agile
software updates, and inexpensive
support. It also protects your
investment by allowing you to easily
upgrade to other platforms. Or even
other OSs, if you for some strange
reason would ever want to do that.

How much you will actually save
depends on many factors, but there are
just so many ways to save with Linux,
from support fees to documentation to
feasible redundancy which means less
down time to flexibility that one thing is
for certain: It will be a bundle. At PCC,
Linux saved more than US$3000 in
initial setup costs and another US$1000
every month, out of software,
communications and maintenance
costs. It also has increased the safety
of the data on the network, provided
the employees with the convenience of
private disk space and access to the
wealth of information offered by the
internet and made internal
communications more agile and
inexpensive. If you though your
company or office was too small to
afford a high quality intranet or a
company-wide internet connection, think
again. With Linux, Now You Can!!!